Periodic flooding of bodies of water has caused serious destruction and loss of life and property. In areas where flooding recurs, dams and levees have been built to contain rising waters. Sometimes theses are sufficient, but more often they are not and the water rises above the levees or is too powerful to be contained and breaks through them.
There have been many patents for portable dams developed for use in and alongside riverbeds and other waterways, but little has been done to devise portable means to stem the rise of floodwaters other than the use of sandbags. Some inventors have utilized water, sand, gravel, or earth as ballast that are essentially large bags filled with some kind of ballast material. Those include:
Serota, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,213,628 teaches the use of plastic containers in the shape of a rectangular solid which can be filled with water and lashed together to form a wall or barrier. The device of Serota is best used in a gorge or similar passageway.
Jackson, III, (U.S. Pat. No. 4,692,060) teaches an elongated water filled tube with side panels in the shape of an equilateral triangle. The tubes are surrounded by wooden frames fastened through loops in the sides of the tubes. The frames are used for support and to help in maintaining the triangular shape of the tubes when filled. A similar device was developed by Coffey (U.S. Pat. No. 4,921,373), but he emphasizes an A-frame structure which can be made from highway or construction barriers. A flexible tube with triangular cross-section is supported by the frame and filled with water. The units can be placed end to end to extend the wall as needed. Velcro strips on the ends of the tubes facilitate fastening the units together.
Another long tubular container (can be 100 feet long) with triangular cross-section was developed by Hendrix (U.S. Pat. No. 5,040,919). The device of Hendrix is not in the form of an equilateral triangle, but one having sides of three different lengths. A skirt is attached to the container along the lower front edge to form a seal with the ground to prevent the rising waters from flowing under the unit. This device uses no outside support, but is very heavy when filled with water. Additional units can be placed end to end to provide a long wall. These units cannot be stacked.
Another approach to the portable module as a flood barrier was taken by Taylor in U.S. Pat. No. 4,981,392. Taylor's module consists of two cylindrical chambers to be filled with water. The modules can be made in varying lengths. They can be placed side-by-side and/or stacked. A staggered stacking pattern can produce a barrier of considerable height and thickness. End to end placement results in a wall of any desired length. There is no mention of a ground seal or any means to prevent the floodwater from passing beneath the modules.
Another method to the portable module as a flood barrier was taken by Hughes in U.S. Pat. No. 5,470,177. Hughes' module consists of compartmented ballast cells that are to be filled with water, sand, gravel, earth, or other such material. The modules are held in place with lightweight support struts and have a waterproof cover that can be armored to prevent penetration by debris.
Clark in U.S. Pat. No. 4,375,929 devised another method of flood protection. Clark's module is comprised of metal panels sealingly attachable to one another to form a continuous barrier around a building structure, and sealed with gaskets and attached to a concrete fixed foundation surrounding the structure, and is also abut against the building in order to spread the force of the flood water against the dam structure.
All of the aforementioned devices may be effective in varying degrees in the path of rising water if the water is not too high, is not coming in rapidly and is not moving with great force. There is still a need for a strong, flexible, portable, continuous barrier of lightweight, water resistant materials that enables its users to erect it quickly and easily using infrastructure that is already in place in both urban and rural areas, giving the user control over water containment and water movement without the hardship and cost of moving and placing vast amounts of sand, water, earth, gravel or other heavy materials that require prodigious amounts of manpower and machinery to place in the short amount of time that containment and control is needed.
My invention relates to the use of roadway-levees that mitigate flooding, storm surges, and other times when excess water is present in urban or rural areas.
Damage from floods results from a combination of the great power of flowing water and the concentration of people and property in floodplains, along rivers, and coasts. In the United States over 3,800 towns and cities of more than 2,500 inhabitants are on floodplains. Damaging floods result when the volume of river flow exceeds levels of flood preparedness, either because flow is greater or longer than expected or because of incomplete understanding of local hazards. Roadway-levees are designed to mitigate flood damage.
The current technology for protecting cities and towns from flooding consists of massive levees and dams. That technology relies on the force of gravity on large, heavy structures made of concrete, and/or earth, and/or sand, and/or gravel. The masses of those structures prevent water from flooding the areas being protected. My roadway-levee uses the same technique in a different form by using the mass of roadways and other cemented or paved surfaces as the underlying foundation or base for holding down and sealing water-resistant barriers.
Levees are built around or adjacent to populated areas like New Orleans in order to protect them. The current designs are one-wall designs. One-wall designs are like the Titanic, which had one steel layer to hold out seawater. The flaw of one-wall designs is that when a one-wall levee is breached, the entire area behind the levee is flooded, just like the Titanic was flooded and sank. The best solution is to have back-up levees such as my roadway-levee to back-up the large massive levees. In many cases where the floodwater is shallow, only roadway levees may be needed, instead of massive one wall concrete levees and dams.
The primary locations for my roadway-levee invention are on the roadways, streets, driveways, sidewalks, and other surfaces that enable roadway levees to be sealed against water leakage. The installation of my roadway-levees on dirt roadways can be made practicable with the use of the installation of lateral concrete and steel foundations surrounding the area to be protected from flooding.
Roadways can act as a base of my roadway-levee system and offer the ability to compartmentalize flooding thereby greatly mitigating flood damage. Roadway-levees reduce the spread of floodwaters because of their location and the manner and materials of which they are constructed. Each “city block” or other structures such as government buildings, office buildings, industrial plants or buildings, residential buildings, shopping centers, stadiums, retail buildings, hospitals, etc. is to be surrounded by a separate roadway-levee compartment to prevent floodwater from entering the protected area. In conjunction with other roadway-levee-protected areas with the water resistant barriers being deployed along the city streets and being sealed to each other at street intersections, floodwater damage will be mitigated.